Cloudflare Inc. (NYSE: NET) and GoDaddy Inc. (NYSE: GDDY) announced a strategic partnership on April 20, 2026, to provide website owners with advanced tools to manage how artificial intelligence (AI) crawlers access and utilize their digital content. The collaboration involves the direct integration of Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control into GoDaddy’s hosting platform and the joint adoption of the Agent Name Service (ANS) open standard.
The partnership is designed to address the evolving landscape of the internet, specifically the shift from traditional search-driven traffic to AI-generated answers. As AI models increasingly provide direct information to users, often bypassing original source links, content creators have sought greater control over their intellectual property. The new integration allows GoDaddy customers to set specific permissions for automated AI crawlers. Through a centralized interface, website owners can choose to allow specific crawlers, block them entirely, or signal that access to their content requires a financial transaction.
A central component of the announcement is the support for the Agent Name Service (ANS). Developed by GoDaddy, ANS is an open standard that utilizes the Domain Name System (DNS) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to assign verifiable identities to AI agents. This system enables website owners to distinguish between legitimate, identified AI agents and unidentified or potentially malicious bots. Cloudflare is also incorporating its Web Bot Auth technology, which was introduced in 2025. Web Bot Auth uses cryptographic signatures within HTTP messages to authenticate bot traffic, providing a technical layer of verification for every interaction.
Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, stated that the internet is transitioning into a high-velocity, AI-driven ecosystem that requires a new type of transparent infrastructure. She noted that by providing these tools, the companies are establishing the essential underpinnings for a new internet business model that protects the value of human-generated content. Jared Sine, Chief Strategy Officer at GoDaddy, emphasized that the partnership provides customers with the transparency and control necessary to thrive in an AI-first world, ensuring that the agentic web operates with clear rules of engagement.
The technical framework also includes the provision of detailed audit logs. These logs allow website owners to monitor which AI agents have accessed their data and ensure compliance with established permissions. Cloudflare currently manages and protects traffic for approximately 20% of the global web, while GoDaddy remains the world’s largest domain name registrar. The companies stated that by combining granular logging with transparent agent identity, they are facilitating a permission-based model for the web that ensures original content is protected and potentially compensated in an era of automated data extraction.